Smoking Cloves

Walking through a college campus, I always smell a hint of cloves. I can’t help but be surprised that people still smoke them — I was similarly surprised to discover people smoked them at all.

The first time I encountered clove cigarettes, in the first few furious days of freshman year, I thought they might be a joke, a prank pulled on an obvious goody-two-shoes like myself. Why on earth would someone choose to smoke a spice? The very idea was ridiculous. It recalled some silly 1980s teen movie I’d likely seen half of at someone’s slumber party, in which a younger brother and his friends tried to smoke oregano out of the kitchen. If the losers out of a movie were trying to smoke spices, all the cool new college kids in Los Angeles certainly wouldn’t be. But they were.